brooks cleanth wh auden as critic

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W. H. Auden as a Critic Author(s): Cleanth Brooks Source: The Kenyon Review, Vol. 26, No. 1 (Winter, 1964), pp. 173-189 Published by: Kenyon College Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4334416 . Accessed: 21/07/2014 15:03 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . Kenyon College is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Kenyon Review. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 147.210.116.177 on Mon, 21 Jul 2014 15:03:36 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

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Page 1: Brooks Cleanth WH Auden as Critic

W. H. Auden as a CriticAuthor(s): Cleanth BrooksSource: The Kenyon Review, Vol. 26, No. 1 (Winter, 1964), pp. 173-189Published by: Kenyon CollegeStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4334416 .

Accessed: 21/07/2014 15:03

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Kenyon College is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Kenyon Review.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 147.210.116.177 on Mon, 21 Jul 2014 15:03:36 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Page 2: Brooks Cleanth WH Auden as Critic

Cleanth Brooks

W. H. AUDEN AS A CRITIC

AUDEN IS PRE-EMINENTLY THE POET OF CIVILIZATION. HE LOVES landscapes, to be sure, and confesses that his favorite is the rath- er austere landscape of the north of England, but over and over he has told us that the prime task of our time is to rebuild the city, to restore community, to help re-establish the just society. Even a cursory glance over his poetry confirms this view. Who else would have written on Voltaire, E. M. Forster, Matthew Arnold, Pascal, Montaigne, Henry James, Melville, and Sigmund Freud? On any one of them, yes, any poet might. But only a poet of civilization would write poems about them all. If one looks through the reviews and the criticism that he has published during the last thirty years, the case for calling Auden the poet of civilization becomes abundantly clear.

A great deal of this criticism is non-literary or only partially literary. Characteristically, it has to do with the problems of modern man seen in an economic or sociological or psychological context. Auden is everywhere interested in the relation of the individual to society, of the metaphysical assumptions implied by the various societies that have existed in history, and of the claims of history and of nature as they exert themselves upon the human being. What constitutes a society and what holds it together? What is an individual and how is he related to society? What makes a hero and from what does his authority over his fellows derive? How do the differences between Greek tragedy and Elizabethan tragedy reflect differences in the civi- lization that produced them? What basic changes of sensibility have occurred during the history of Westem civilization?

To his interest in cultural patterns and to basic psychological patteems, Auden brings a real zest for classification. In view of

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such interests and aptitudes, it is not surprising that much of his criticism deals with genres. He devotes a great deal of attention to such topics as the theory of comedy or the kinds of tragedy or the modes of the romantic hero. "Notes on the Comic," an essay published in 1952 in Thought, is typical. The tone and general arrangement of the essay remind one a little of the Poetics-but Auden is not consciously trudging after either the Stagyrite himself or the critics of the Chicago School. He is simply very much interested in his subject, there is a great deal that he wants to make clear to the reader, and he prefers to work systematically.

Genre criticism is closely related to the explorations of the psychological categories of character and action. In this area, Auden has done some of his most brilliant work. A masterpiece of this kind of criticism is his elaborate discussion of the master- servant relationship in literature. The title of the essay is "Balaam and the Ass." It was published in 1954 in Thought. Auden begins by defining the master-servant relationship in almost pedantically exact terms. It is not a relationship given by nature but comes into being through an act of conscious volition. It is not an erotic relationship. It is a contractual relationship. (Auden even takes care to tell his reader precisely what a contract is.) Finally, the master-servant relationship is a relation between real persons. (The employees of a factory, for example, are not servants because the master they serve is the factory, a fictitious and not a real person.)

And what, we may ask, has all of this to do with literature? Because the soliloquy, useful though it is, is not enough. In order to present "artistically a human personality in its full depth," we need dialogue and the requisite dialogue demands a special pair. The two people must be similar in certain respects, but in others polar opposites. They must be inseparable-that is, the relationship must not be the kind that is affected by the passage of time or the fluctuations of passion. There is, Auden tells us, "only one relationship which satisfies all those condi- tions, that between master and personal servant."

The neat click of the logic here may remind us of Edgar Allan Poe, in his "Philosophy of Composition," reasoning his

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way to the most poetic of all possible topics, the death of a beautiful woman. The apparatus assembled by Auden is, in all conscience, formidable, so much so as to create some anxiety in the reader as to what of value the writer can possibly say after such a prologue. What follows, however, fully vindicates him.

The essay is too long and too richly packed for me to do more than suggest some of the matters treated. There is a very interesting account of the master-servant relationship between lovers, with observations on chivalrous service for the sake of the master-mistress of one's passion. There is a very interesting discussion of Faust and Mephistopheles, and of Don Giovanni, and of Tristan and Isolde. How does the master-servant relation bear upon these characters? Because Don Giovanni's pleasure in seducing women is not sensual but arithmetical. He simply wants to make his list as long as possible, and, since his servant Leporello keeps the list, Leporello in effect becomes the master.

Auden goes on to say that "Just as ... Don Giovanni might have chosen to collect stamps instead of women, so . . . Tristan and Isolde might have fallen in love with two other people; they are so indifferent to each other as persons . . . that they might just as well-and this is one significance of the love potion -have drawn each other's names out of a hat." A romantic idolatry can be maintained through a lifetime only if the romance is one-sided and one party plays the Cruel Fair. In spite of their declarations of love for each other, Tristan and Isolde in fact "both play the Cruel Fair and withhold them- selves." Their passion is not for each other-here Auden is in basic agreement with Denis de Rougemont-but for the Nirvana that each hopes to obtain by means of the other. They do not know each other as persons at all; they are really insubstantial, and it is the servants, Kurvenal and Brangaene, who make their decisions and finally control the action.

The next two sections of "Balaam and the Ass" deal with Shakespearean plays, King Lear and The Tempest. Lear as master and the fool as servant provide the occasion for some familiar observations upon their relationship but also for much fresh and exciting commentary. A hint of its quality is given in Auden's comment that in an ideal stage production "Lear

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and the fool should be of the same physical type; they should be athletic mesomorphs. The difference should be in their re- spective sizes. Lear should be as huge as possible, the fool as tiny." Shakespeare's Tempest apparently exercises a peculiar fascination upon Auden. He has discussed it on a number of oc- casions. His The Sea and the Mirror carries as its subtitle "A Commentary on Shakespeare's The Tempest," and its long prose third section, spoken by Caliban to the Audience, has to do with the nature of art and its function in the human economy.

In "Balaam and the Ass," Auden says of The Tempest that he frankly finds it "a disquieting work." Auden cannot really approve of Prospero, who is guilty of-though Auden does not use the term-what would be called today colonialism. Caliban loses much more than he gains under Prospero's domination of the island. If Prospero is master and Ariel a servant who is under proper contractual relation, Caliban is simply a slave. Auden sums up his sense of disquiet by saying that "The Tempest is overpessimistic and manichean." On the other hand, The Magic Flute, one of Auden's favorite works of art, is, he concedes, "overoptimistic and pelagian."

The most orthodox, as well as the greatest of the spirit- nature pairs in the master-servant relation is that of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. "Unlike Prospero and Caliban," Auden observes, "their relationship is harmonious and happy; unlike [that of] Tamino and Papageno [in The Magic Flute], it is dialectical; each affects the other." But Don Quixote is one of Auden's favorite characters and of him he always writes con amore.

The concluding section of this highly interesting and highly speculative essay has to do with the master-servant relationship in Jules Veme's Around the World in Eighty Days and in the novels of P. G. Wodehouse. At the opening of Verne's novel Mr. Fogg, Auden tells us, is a kind of stoic and his servant Passepartout a kind of mercurial spirit. But, as the novel goes on, man and master transcend the merely contractual relation- ship: each ceases to be impersonal to the other, and finally each is willing to sacrifice himself for the other.

In the final paragraph of "Balaam and the Ass" the discus-

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sion is connected with another one of Auden's favorite themes, that of the quest and the actions of the quest hero. Wodehouse's Bertie Wooster becomes a kind of inverted quest hero. Through the voices of Bertie Wooster and his incomparable servant, the godlike Jeeves, Auden is able to hear, in spite of their comic intonations, "the voice of Agape, of Holy Love."

The last comment is calculated to leave the reader gasping. Even the reader sympathetic with Auden's religious position may feel that this essay contains more stimulation than nourish- ment and constitutes a diet much too rich for his blood. But I shall not say this for myself. With particular aspects of the dis- cussion, I have my own quarrels. I am at odds with Auden's reading of The Tempest, for example. I have certain reservations about the kind of criticism exhibited in "Balaam and the Ass." Discussion of ideas and psychological patterns, I would observe, always tends to move away from specifically literary criticism. It seems to me significant that Auden can illustrate some of the relationships that interest him most from second- and third-rate artists like Verne and Wodehouse as well as from first-rate artists like Shakespeare and Cervantes. But I go on to reflect that such observations need not, and would not, disconcert Auden. On the whole, I must say that I find "Balaam and the Ass" a remarkable document: the author is sensitive. intelligent, resourceful, quick to discern analogies and linkages where most of us, left to our own devices, would see nothing at all.

In view of his general interest in psychology and the recur- rent psychological pattems that underlie the literary genres, it is apparent that Auden is also to be regarded as an archetypal critic. It is true, of course, that he does not often use the term archetype. I recall only one instance of it in my recent reading of his critical essays and reviews. In his first volume of criticism, The Enchafied Flood, he usually emplovs the term "symbol" or "symbolic cluster," but his discussion of the images used by the Romantics-the desert and the sea, the paradisal island and the magical garden, the stone and the shell carried by the Arab in Wordsworth's vision-constitutes what is frequently called archetypal criticism. His interest in symbolic clusters, especially in those that relate to recurrent psychological situations, goes

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far back in his literary career. That interest was well developed as early as 1940 when he published "The Quest." The psycho- logical situations (dramatized in these sonnets receive a full-scale elaboration in the essay titled "K's Quest," which was published in The Kafka Problem in 1946. There Auden distinguishes seven kinds of quest, beginning with the fairy story which typically has for its goal "either some sacred object which endows its possessor with magical powers . . . or marriage with a beautiful princess, or both... ." One of the more curious versions of the quest is the one that Auden calls the "quest for innocence." It is exemplified in the typical detective story.

In the typical detective story one finds, according to Auden, "a group of people ... living in what appears to be a state of innocence and grace, where there is no law since there is no need for it. A corpse is found under conditions which make it certain that one of the group must be the murderer, i.e., that state of innocence is lost and the law enters. All fall under suspicion but the hero-detective who identifies and arrests the guilty one and innocence is restored to the rest. ..."

To apply terms like "state of innocence and grace" to the detective story will seem to many addicts pretentious; but a year or two later in "The Guilty Vicarage: Notes on the Detec- tive Story, by an Addict," Auden was to take the whole thing up another notch. There, for example, he writes: "There are three classes of crime: (a) offences against God and one's neighbor or neighbors; (b) offences against God and society; (c) offences against God."

Now Auden becomes very specific: "Murder," he writes, "is a member and the only member of Class B. The character common to all crimes in Class A is that it is possible, at least theoretically, either that restitution can be made to the injured party ... or that the injured party can forgive the criminal... consequently. society as a whole is only indirectly involved; directly. its representatives (the police, etc.) act in the interest of the injured party. Murder is unique in that it abolishes the party it injures, so that society has to take the place of the victim and on his behalf demand restitution or grant forgiveness; it is the one crime in which society has a direct interest." But

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this is so legalistic, so hairsplittingly precise, that to many readers it will sound like an embarrassing self-parody. People who are bored by detective stories and resent Auden's Christian- ity will see in this essay Auden at his weakest and most absurd. I should prefer to regard portions of "The Guilty Vicarage" as representing Auden at his most special, limited, and eccentric.

Where is he at his best as a critic? I have already praised the quality of discussion in "Balaam and the Ass" and in The EnchafMd Flood. If asked for a shorter example and one more directly concerned with literature as such, I think that I should suggest Auden's introduction to A Selection from the Poems of Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1947). It is brief-about 4000 words- but very much to the point, distinctly a professional job, the work of a practicing man of letters. In the first place, it is characteristic of Auden in its systematic arrangement. Auden defines three kinds of bad poetry. The poet "may be bored or in a hurry and write work which is technically slipshod or care- lessly expressed. From this fault, of which Shakespeare is not infrequently guilty, Tennyson is quite free." Secondly, he may produce passages which are, at a serious moment, unintention- ally funny. Here Tennyson is guilty and Auden submits ex- amples. Thirdly, a poet may write bad poetry which is not "accidental," like the first two kinds, but which is rooted in some inner corruption of his own consciousness. The poet "means" the badness and cannot be convinced that it is a fault. Tennyson is guilty here and Auden submits some telling examples. There follows an interesting speculation as to the root of this third fault-with special references to Tennyson's case. The reader will be convinced or not convinced, but he will feel the point worth making and at the least will learn something about Tennyson's sensibility.

Next Auden lists-system again, though useful in this brief note-five elements that are found over and over again in Tennyson's poetry. He comments that "In no other English poet of comparable rank does the bulk of his work seem so clearly to be inspired by some single and probably very early experience." Then comes the shocker: "If Wordsworth is the great English poet of Nature, then Tennyson is the great English

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poet of the Nursery. . . i.e., his poems deal with human emotions in their most primitive states, uncomplicated by conscious sex- uality or intellectual rationalization." Here again the reader may or may not be convinced, but he will find Auden's judgment plausible, at least partially true, and, in any case, one that will force him to consider from a new angle Tennyson's special pre- occupation with numbed sadness.

In order to "place" Tennyson in his cultural scene, Auden invokes Nietzsche's description of Wagner, Kierkegaard on the subject of his own childhood, a passage from Saint Augustine's Confessions, and some quotations from Baudelaire-the reflec- tions, as Auden terms them, of a "cosmopolitan satanic dandy." The range of reference is, again, characteristic of Auden's criticism. The allusion to Baudelaire develops into an extended series of parallels and contrasts with Tennyson, a series which occupies the last several pages of the introduction. Auden con- cedes the dissimilarities between the poets, but points out that both men "felt themselves to be exiles from a lost paradise, desert dwellers . . . both shared the same nostalgia for the Happy Isles . . . both imagine Eden in the same Rousseauistic terms; i.e., as a place of natural innocence rather than super- natural illumination."

Baudelaire is obviously the greater poet but not, according to Auden, because he had a keener sensibility-rather because "he developed a first-rate critical intelligence which prevented him from writing an epic about Roland . . . to escape from his vision of the abyss. On the other hand, it led him into an error which Tennyson escaped-the error of making a religion of the aesthetic." Auden says that Baudelaire "was right in seeing that art is beyond good and evil," and that "Tennyson was a fool to try to write a poetry which would teach the Ideal"; but Auden goes on to observe that "Tennyson was right in seeing that an art which is beyond good and evil is a game of second- ary importance, and Baudelaire was the victim of his own pride in persuading himself that a mere game was 'le meilleur temoig- nage / que nous puissions donner de notre dignite.' "

I find these parallels and contrasts highly interesting. It is, in the best sense, an act of the imagination to relate two such

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poets so as to make each reflect light upon the other. But the confrontation is not arbitrary and mechanical: the perception of a meaningful relation between them derives from a coherent theory of poetry, including the limitations of poetry as well as its powers, together with specific notions about the function of the poet and his proper role in a society. To see this, one need only extract from the concluding pages of Auden's introduction such suggestive phrases as "a first-rate critical intelligence" as a prime resource of a poet, "the error of making a religion of the aesthetic" as a modem misconception of the poet's role, the lack of any "sense of a historical relation between individuals"- this said of Tennyson-and, finally, the attempt (Auden re- gards it as a mistaken one) "to evade the need for a religious faith by finding some form of magical certainty."

"The error of making a religion of the aesthetic" constitutes much of the substance of Caliban's speech to the audience in Auden's The Sea and the Mirror. Auden takes this error very seriously, but he is in no sense a didactic poet who demands that poetry should propagandize for Christianity or any other faith. Indeed, for a man so deeply engrossed in the political problems of our day, for a person who is so serious a moralist and so keen a psychologist, Auden's conception of poetry may seem startling in the limited role which he assigns it. What that role is, what the structure of poetry is, and what the relation of poetry to truth is in Auden's account-these are matters which will occupy most of the space remaining to me in this paper.

The indirect relation of poetry to the world of fact and action is not an idea which came to Auden rather late in his career. It occurs in the well-known and often anthologized poem, "In Memory of W. B. Yeats," where the poet says,

For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives In the valley of its saying where executives Would never want to tamper. ...

But though poetry makes nothing happen, the poet evidently has a role of some importance and a duty, for he is urged, in the perilous times of 1939 when the poem appeared, to make a

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vineyard "of the curse" and, though he must sing of human unsuccess "in a rapture of distress," he should "teach the free man how to praise."

Auden's essay "The Public vs. the Late Mr. William Butler Yeats" (1939) constitutes a kind of gloss on the poem. In the course of that essay Auden writes: "I am not trying to suggest that art exists independently of society. The relation between the two is . . . intimate and important. . . ." But you simply can't grade a poet up for proper political opinions, and down for improper. "Art is a product of history, not a cause"-and so Auden can echo his poem in saying that the case against Yeats "rests upon the fallacious belief that art ever makes any- thing happen, whereas the honest truth ... is that, if not a poem had been written, not a picture painted, not a bar of music composed, the history of man would be materially unchanged."

The first of Auden's essays that reveals his theory of poetry rather developed is "Squares and Oblongs." Though it appears to be no more than a collection of scattered observations on the poet and poetry and his audience, a very coherent and self- consistent pattem emerges. For example, Auden's earlier ob- servation that the poet is a man of action in one field only, that of language, here becomes the statement that the poet is "before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language." And Auden illustrates this notion by proposing a test: Ask a young man why he wants to write poetry; if his answer is, "I have important things I want to say," one can conclude that he is not a poet. But if he answers, "I like hanging around words listening to what they say," then maybe he is going to be a poet. So much for the stigmata of the poet. Now for a concise definition of poetry: there are, Auden says, "two theories of poetry. Poetry as a magical means for inducing desirable emotions and repelling undesirable emotions in one- self and others, or Poetry as a game of knowledge, a bringing to consciousness, by naming them, of emotions and their hidden relationships.

"The first view was held by the Greeks and is now," Auden remarks, "held by MGM, Agit-Prop, and the collective public of the world. They are wrong."

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Auden's characterization of poetry "as a magical means for inducing desirable emotions and repelling undesirable emotions in oneself and others" is derived from R. G. Collingwood's Principles of Art, a book published in 1938. In his chapter titled "Art as Magic," Collingwood argues that the primary function of all magical acts is "to generate in the agent or agents certain emotions that are considered necessary or usefuL . . ." Magic usually works through artistic or quasi-artistic means, but its aim is not that of art: magic works up the emotions to release them for the sake of a particular practical act.

In "Henry James an Artist in America" (1948), Auden writes about the temptation to the artist to become "an official magician, who uses his talents to arouse in the inert masses the passions which the authorities consider socially desirable and necessary." But the artist, Auden says, must never have "any truck with magic, whether in its politer forrns like diplomatic cultural missions, or in its more virulent varieties...." This is not, however, because art is of sacred importance but on the contrary because it is, as Auden puts it, "in the profoundest sense, frivolous. For one thing, and one thing only is serious: loving one's neighbor as one's self."

Collingwood also makes a sharp distinction between magic and religion, and between art and religion. Here the influence of Collingwood-if I am right in supposing that it is behind much of Auden's theory-would corroborate the much more powerful and pervasive influence of Kierkegaard. Art, Auden tells us in "Squares and Oblongs," is not a religion. He has to concede that the Greeks did produce some great works of art in spite of the fact that they "confused art with religion." This could happen, Auden tells us-rather consciously riding his high horse here-because the Greeks were, "in reality, like all pagans . . . frivolous people who took nothing seriously."

Auden is willing to follow this anti-emotive view of poetry right on through. He rejects, for example, in Aristotle's Poetics the one main deviation into emotive theory, saying that if he understands what Aristotle means when he speaks of "catharsis, [he] can only say he is wrong." You do get a purgation of the emotions from witnessing a bullfight or a professional football

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match, but not from a work of art. Moreover, poetry is not prophecy. Shelley's claim for the poets that they are "the un- acknowledged legislators of the world" is, says Auden, "the silliest remark ever made about poets...

That the present state of the world is parlous, Auden agrees. Indeed, that state of the world is "so miserable and degraded that if anyone were to say to the poet: 'For God's sake, stop humming and put the kettle on or fetch bandages. The patient's dying,' I do not know how he could justifiably refuse." Un- fortunately, no one ever asks the poet to carry out some useful and practical action. What the self-appointed, unqualified Nurse typically says to the poet is this: "Stop humming this instant and sing the Patient a song which will make him fall in love witlh me. In return I'll give you extra ration-cards and a passport"; and the poor delirious patient cries (out to the poet): "Please stop humming and sing me a song which will make me believe I am free from pain and perfectly well." But the poet, though he ought to be willing to mop the floor or carry bedpans or do any other useful task, must have the courage to deny all such requests and the bribes that go with them. (Auden means this: he uses this same illustration on at least two other oc- casions.)

Does the poet, then, have no responsibility to society? Auden would, I believe, answer that he does, but he would insist that the poet cannot allow a Stalin or a Goebbels or even a President Hoover-I believe I remember Hoover's asking in 1931 for the production of a good poem that would restore our confidence and end the depression-to tell him how to discharge that re- sponsibility, nor can the poet allow the public to tell him how to discharge it. If he has a specific responsibility as poet, that re- sponsibility can be discharged only through his being the best poet that he knows how to be.

In "Nature, History, and Poetry" (1950) appeared Auden's most fully matured statement of his conception of poetry. As the title would suggest, nature and history are the co-ordinates for a whole series of definitions and observations about man and his experience. Auden distinguishes, for example, between natural events, which are related by the principle of Identity,

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and historical events, which are related by the principle of Analogy. He also distinguishes between laws that apply to natural events and those that apply to historical events, "laws- of" and "laws-for." As for man's social life, there are crowds, societies, and communities-among which Auden draws a very careful distinction. Crowds are simply happen-so; societies have a definite size and specific structure. (Elsewhere, Auden tells us a "society is a group of rational beings united by a common function.") A community, on the other hand, is bound together by a common love. "It is only in history that one can speak of communities as well as societies...

Man exists "as a unity in tension of four modes of being, Soul, Body, Mind and Spirit.... As body and mind, man is a natural creature; as soul and spirit, an historical creature." Auden then works out the implications of this dual position for man's consciousness of himself in relation to the world about him.

Nature and history provide the distinction between science and art. The subject matter of the natural scientist "is a crowd of historic occasions of feeling in the past. He accepts this crowd as real and attempts to transform it into a commu- nity. . . ." The implications for poetry of this last comment are immense. Because the subject matter of the poet consists of occasions of past feeling, in poetry "desire is seen, as it were, in a mirror, detached from its roots in appetite and passion...." Auden agrees heartily with Wordsworth in thinking that in poetry the emotion must indeed be "recollected in tranquillity." Language, to be sure, can be used to introduce "emotion into the present," for example in propaganda or pornography; but, Auden says, "such use is magical, not poetical." Elsewhere in this essay he defines propaganda as "the employment of magic by those who do not believe in it over against those who do."

In order to define a poem, Auden invokes an analogy from the social context in which men live. A poem, he says, is a linguistic society or verbal system. But a poem differs from many other "verbal societies" in that "meaning and being are identical. Thus, it is not quite accurate to say that "a poem should not mean but be." On the other hand, a poem differs from a human society in the fact that it has natural being and

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not historical being. "Like an image in the mirror, a poem might be called a pseudo person"; that is, the poem has "uniqueness and addresses the reader as person to person but, like all natural beings and unlike historical persons, it cannot lie."

Auden thus makes Philip Sidney's famous point very adroitly but in his own way. He writes that "it is not possible to say of a poem that it is true or false [,] for one does not have to go to anything except [the poem] itself to discover whether or not it is in fact . . . a community of feelings truly embodied in a verbal society. If it is not, if unfreedom or disorder is present, the poem itself reveals this on inspection." That is, if I may be allowed to make my own comment here, the problem is not one of discovering whether some proposition made by the poem is true or false; it is rather that of discovering whether the poem is truly unified or chaotic, whether its parts are related or un- related, whether it embodies order or is rent apart by disorder.

How does the poet go about transforming the two "crowds" at his disposal-the words in his vocabulary and the feelings of past occasions that he can recall-into a verbal society in which the feelings form a community? Through a dialectical struggle. For the verbal system is "actively coercive upon the feelings it is attempting to embody" and, Auden admits, what it "cannot embody truthfully it excludes." On the other hand, "the feelings are passively resistant to all claims of the system to embody them [all claims, that is] which they do not recognize as just. ..."

This recognition of resistances to be overcome, as feeling competes with feeling, and as word exerts its pressure on feeling and feeling exerts its pressure on the choice of word, is reminis- cent of a considerably body of critical opinion in our day. I am thinking of Yeats, Nietzsche, I. A. Richards, John Crowe Ran- som, and others; but I am not concerned here to trace Auden to a particular set of sources or to impugn his originality. In dis- cussing the resistances to be adjusted and the conflicting claims to be reconciled, Auden writes that "every feeling competes with every other demanding inclusion and a dominant position to which they are not necessarily entitled, and every word de- mands that the system shall modify itself in its case...." Like

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a human society, the poem embodies tensions and achieves its unity, when it achieves it, through tensions. Since this is the way in which a poem is organized, it may fail in either of two ways: it may exclude too much and thus fall into banality, or it may "attempt to embody more than one community at once" and thus fall into disorder.

Naturally, my own ears perk up at Auden's use of terms like "inclusion" and phrases like "exclude too much." Let me attempt, then, my own summary of what Auden is saying in this highly condensed essay. Throughout the essay, Auden sees the basic poetic problem as the problem of securing unity. He takes into account the resistances which any poet must ac- knowledge and reconcile if his poem is to become a poem at all- resistances which he cannot deny if he is to hope to produce a mature and an honest poem. In any poem unity is secured by means of two basic principles. The first involves trimming off the contradictions and irrelevances-that is, excluding what cannot be honestly embodied in the poem. The second involves a process of inclusion in which the disparate and recalcitrant are fitted into the poem by a deepening and widening of the imag- inative context. The poem which is overambitious in its at- tempt to include the jarring and the difficult may, of course, fail to achieve unity and remain incoherent. But too much reliance on exclusion carries its risks, too: the poem may be robbed of depth and richness.

Auden concludes his essay with a series of analogies drawn from Christianity. Every poet, he writes, consciously or uncon- sciously holds the following "absolute presuppositions, as the dogmas of his art: (1) An historical world exists, a world of unique events and unique persons.... (2) The historical world is a fallen world.... (3) The historical world is a redeemable world. The unfreedom and disorder of the past can be reconciled in the future." That is, any poet at work on a poem finds him- self trying to put in order, and thus into meaningful relationship, experiences which demand to be redeemed in knowledge.

As he pursues this analogy, Auden may be said to present a parallel to Eliot's view of the impersonality of art: "In poetry as in other matters," Auden says, "the law holds good that he

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who would save his life must lose it; unless the poet sacrifices his feelings completely to the poem, so that they are no longer his but the poem's, he fails." Whether borrowed from Eliot or not, the basic conception is the same: the poem is not primarily the poet's expression of personal feelings; it is not the expression of the poet that counts but the organization of the thing that he is making. The poem, then, according to Auden, is "beautiful or ugly to the degree that it succeeds or fails in reconciling con- tradictory feelings in an order of mutual propriety."

Why contradictory, someone will ask; and Auden's implied answer surely would run something like this: because the mate- rial with which he works involves unfreedom and disorder. Poetry which systematically ignores contradiction and disorder and evil is banal, if not lying. In the end, I suppose that Auden would finally simply appeal to the facts. The great poems, not merely the great tragedies but even lyrics that possess depth and resonance, are not really "simple" but exhibit in their very make-up a triumph won over confusion, disharmony, and dis- order. Auden continues his comment by saying that "Every beautiful poem presents an analogy to the forgiveness of sins, an analogy, not an imitation, because it is not evil intentions which are repented of and pardoned but contradictory feelings which the poet surrenders to the poem in which they are recon- ciled."

Auden obviously values his analogy and presumably would be reluctant to surrender it. But to people who are ruffle(d by the Christian association, Auden could, without giving up his essential point, offer the testimony of Nietzsche. I am thinking of such of Nietzsche's statements as "contrasts are . . . the highest sign of [artistic] power . . . manifesting itself in the conquest of opposites"; or his remark that the greatest artists are those "who make harmony ring out of every discord." The genuine artist does not narrow his poetry to express one or the other of the contradictory feelings. He fashions a poem in which they are reconciled and unified.

That Auden, the poet of civilization, the student of cultural history, the serious moralist, should hold what amounts to a formalist conception of poetry may come as a shock. Yet it is

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plainly a fact, and a little reflection will indicate that no contra- diction is involved. Auden's position may disturb some of our conventional notions and habitual associations, but the con- ventional notions of most of us usually profit from being shaken up. The assumption that poetry must be either an escape from life or else the blueprint for a better life is obviously oversimple.

I shall not, however, be content to argue that Auden's critical position is self-consistent and tenable for a man who is deeply concerned with the problems of civilization. I propose that Auden's special position is a positive source of strength. It has enabled him to avoid most of the traps laid for the historical critic, the moralistic critic, and the archetypal critic. Auden's respect for the autonomy of art has forbidden him to consider it as merely the handmaiden of a religion or of a political party. On the other hand, his sense of the limitations of art-he is willing to call it in final terms frivolous-prevents his turning it into a kind of ersatz religion.

Auden is not only aware of the relation of art to religion and to science. He knows how the various kinds of criticism are related to the literary work and to each other. Indeed, he practices several kinds of criticism with equal competence not, surely, as a virtuoso display and not because one kind of criticism is as good as another or because any old criticism will do, but rather because an expert craftsman possesses specialized tools and knows what each is good for.

Auden's virtues as a critic obviously spring from his intelli- gence, sensitivity, power of imagination, and depth of insight. These qualities are primary: no literary theory could possibly provide a substitute for them. But a sound theory does allow the critic to make the best use of his natural endowment, and his possession of a coherent and responsible theory accounts for Auden's having become one of the soundest as well as one of the most exciting critics of our day.

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